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Independent review recommends limiting NSA's powers

ELEANOR HALL: And staying in the US, the White House has released an independent review it commissioned into the National Security Agency (NSA) over the domestic spying scandal, and it's released it a month early.

The report recommends that the president wind back the agency's powers and limit its spying on foreign and domestic citizens.

North America correspondent Ben Knight reports from Washington.

BEN KNIGHT: For more than 60 years, it's been the NSA that's been doing all the watching.

But with each new leak from the Edward Snowden files, the National Security Agency has found itself increasingly in the spotlight, and under scrutiny over the masses of private information it collects and stores about American citizens.

Last week, this notoriously secret organisation did something it's never done before - it went on the PR offensive, opening its doors for the first time ever to a television crew.

KEITH ALEXANDER: The fact is we're not collecting everybody's email.

BEN KNIGHT: That's the NSA's director, Major General Keith Alexander.

KEITH ALEXANDER: We're not collecting everybody's phone things, we're not listening to that. Our job is foreign intelligence and we're very good at that.

BEN KNIGHT: The 60 Minutes report that aired on Sunday night was widely panned as giving the NSA a soft ride in exchange for exclusive access.

But any public relations benefit the NSA got out of it was probably lost the very next day - when US Federal Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that the agency's bulk collection of American's phone records violated the US Constitution.

Then on Tuesday, the heads of America's biggest tech companies - like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft - all huddled in the White House to tell president Barack Obama what they think about the NSA secretly tapping into their data networks to get at their customers' information - which is probably why the White House has issued a circuit breaker: deciding to release an independent review into the NSA's activities a month ahead of schedule.

JAY CARNEY: This is a serious document.

BEN KNIGHT: That's the White House spokesman, Jay Carney.

JAY CARNEY: The president I think has been very proactive and aggressive in making sure that this internal review is being done and in making clear that he has made changes and will make changes based on these assessments.

BEN KNIGHT: So what does the report say? Well, quite a lot. It's more than 300 pages long and it has 46 recommendations - and they cover not just domestic spying in the US, but also, the NSA's activities overseas.

It says the US government should no longer be allowed to simply collect and store mass, undigested personal information about Americans just on the off chance it may want to use the data years down the track.

It also recommends handing the NSA's vast hoard of phone data over to a third party - or even leaving it with the phone companies themselves.

And it says decisions about things like spying on foreign leaders should be made by the president, not by the intelligence agencies, and that the same privacy protections guaranteed to US citizens be extended to the citizens of countries that are close allies.

It's probably that the most damage has been done when it comes to American foreign relations.

The journalist who broke the Snowden leaks, Glenn Greenwald, was asked to testify before a European parliamentary committee this week.

GLENN GREENWALD: The objective of this system is nothing less than the elimination of individual privacy worldwide.

BEN KNIGHT: Barack Obama will deliver his response to the report in January.